African reference alphabet

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An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended to use single letters for a sound (actually a phoneme) instead of using two or three-letter combinations or letters with diacritical marks.

The African Reference Alphabet is clearly related to the Africa Alphabet and reflected practice based on the latter. The Niamey conference also built on work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting on harmonization of transcriptions of African languages, that was held in Bamako, Mali in 1966.

Contents

Separate versions of the conference's report were produced in English and French. Different images of the alphabet were used in the two versions, and there are a number of differences between the two.

The English version proposed an alphabet of 57 letters, given in both upper and lower-case forms. Eight of these are formed from common Latin letters with the addition of an underline mark (_). Several of the glyphs, mostly upper-case forms, are unusual and cannot (yet) be accurately represented in Unicode.

This version also listed eight accents (acute accent (´), grave accent (`), circumflex (^), caron (ˇ), macron (¯), tilde (˜), trema (¨)), and a superscript dot (˙)) and nine punctuation marks ( ? ! ( ) « » , ; . ).

In the French version, the letters were hand-printed in lower case only. Only 56 of the letters in the English version were listed - omitting the hooktop-z - and two further apostrophe-like letters (ʾ and ʿ) were included. Also, five of the letters were written with a subscript dot instead of an underscore as in the English version (ḍ, ḥ, ṣ, ṭ and ẓ). (These represent Arabic-style emphatic sounds while the remaining underlined letters (c̱, q̱ and x̱) represent clicks.) Accents and punctuation do not appear. The French and English sets are otherwise identical.

lowercase a ɑ b ɓ c c̱ d ḏ ɖ ɗ đ
uppercase A ɑ B Ɓ C C̱ D Ḏ Ɖ Ɗ Đ
lowercase e ɛ ǝ f ƒ g ɣ h ẖ i ı
uppercase E Ɛ Ǝ F Ƒ G Ɣ H H̱ I Ɩ
lowercase j k ƙ l m n ŋ o ɔ p q
uppercase J K Ƙ L M N Ŋ O Ɔ P Q
lowercase q̱ r ɍ s s̱ ʃ t ṯ ƭ ʈ ɵ u
uppercase Q̱ R Ɍ S S̱ Ʃ T Ṯ Ƭ Ʈ Ɵ U
lowercase ʊ v ʋ w x x̱ y ƴ z ẕ ʒ
uppercase Ʊ V Ʋ W X X̱ Y Ƴ Z Ẕ Ʒ

The 1982 revision of the alphabet was made by Michael Mann and David Dalby, who had attended the Niamey conference. It has 56 letters, a number of which are quite different from the 1978 version. Another key feature of this alphabet is that it included only lower-case letters (making it a unicase alphabet).

The proposal also included eight diacritics: acute accent (´), grave accent (`), circumflex (^), caron (ˇ), macron (¯) to mark tone, a tilde (˜) to mark nasalization, a subscript dot (.), and an underline mark (_). The trema was used for some vowels.

A typewriter keyboard was proposed as well: for the additional characters, the uppercase letters had to be given up. It was probably for this reason that the keyboard did not get used. However, the proposal of the additional characters is valuable as it reflects the needs for writing African languages. On the other hand, in quite some orthographies of African languages, two-letter combinations are used for representing additional sounds.

a ɑ ʌ b ɓ c ƈ ç d ɗ ɖ đ e ɛ ǝ
f ƒ g ɠ ɣ h ɦ i ı j ɟ k ƙ l λ
m n ɴ ŋ ɲ o ɔ p ƥ q r ɽ s ʃ t
ƭ ʈ ɵ u ω v ʋ w x y ƴ z ʒ ƹ ʔ

Mann, Michael, and David Dalby. 1987. A thesaurus of African languages: A classified and annotated inventory of the spoken languages of Africa with an appendix on their written representation. London: Hans Zell Publishers.

African Languages: Proceedings of the meeting of experts on the transcription and harmonization of African languages, Niamey (Niger), 17 - 21 July 1978, Paris: UNESCO, 1981


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